Vivian Gornick

self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions.

— Vivian Gornick

They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.

— Vivian Gornick

Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.

— Vivian Gornick

“...the men are undone by the need to master, and the women by the power of self-doubt.”

— Vivian Gornick

What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge

— Vivian Gornick

“Una mujer sabe si ama a un hombre", decía. "Si no está segura, es que no lo ama”

— Vivian Gornick

in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity; everyone is marginal.

— Vivian Gornick

“All I had to do was get old enough and New York would be mine.”

— Vivian Gornick

That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know…

— Vivian Gornick

Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us…

— Vivian Gornick

Papa's love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her…

— Vivian Gornick

“She seemed never to be troubled by the notion that there might be two sides to a story, or more than one…

— Vivian Gornick

What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write…

— Vivian Gornick

We cannot depend on change, but we can depend on surprise. However, we cannot always depend on surprise either. This keeps us…

— Vivian Gornick

Sex is the killer. Sexual love makes you feel more vulnerable than any other kind of love. That's one reason that people…

— Vivian Gornick

The older I grow, the more I realize how unfit we are for relationships. We are all such antagonists. It's part of…

— Vivian Gornick

When I work I feel more alive than under any other circumstances. There's not an 'I love you' in the world that…

— Vivian Gornick

“The live, warm presence of my mother had disappeared. In its place stood this remoteness posing as Mama. Her anxiety was unbearable…

— Vivian Gornick

“I nearly weep. All I had ever wanted was that my mother be glad to be alive in my presence. I am…

— Vivian Gornick

Adorable in her not-very-bright submissiveness, charming in her childlike delight in shiny floors, even forgivable in her spiteful competition for the whitest,…

— Vivian Gornick

I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody…

— Vivian Gornick

Whatever a scientist is doing - reading, cooking, talking, playing - science thoughts are always there at the edge of the mind.…

— Vivian Gornick

“And I—the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image—I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid…

— Vivian Gornick

... the whole sickening trickery in life -- the idea that one cannot fight for one's humanity without, ironically, losing it ...…

— Vivian Gornick

“As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a…

— Vivian Gornick

How dominating is appetite, how enveloping immediate experience! Even the philosophically minded among us capitulate, ultimately, to the narrowest sense of personal…

— Vivian Gornick

The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. ... The letter, written in absorbed…

— Vivian Gornick

“My friendship with Leonard began with me invoking the laws of love: the ones that involved the expectancy. "We are one," I…

— Vivian Gornick

The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money -…

— Vivian Gornick

A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness…

— Vivian Gornick

A people who have only just begun to emerge from a state of subjugation are in no position to be even-handed ...…

— Vivian Gornick

We all grew up so utterly vulnerable, enthralled by romantic love as we knew it. First of all, it was pounded into…

— Vivian Gornick

It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.

— Vivian Gornick

You are the instrument of your own illumination.

— Vivian Gornick

What feminism did was make clear for me how much I longed for clarity. I got married twice, each time in a…

— Vivian Gornick

You can't reduce an actual human being; you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.

— Vivian Gornick

The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought…

— Vivian Gornick

I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it…

— Vivian Gornick

Emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. It's a…

— Vivian Gornick

“I had an affair with a downtown playwright. Two things about this man: He was an ex-alcoholic, and he was phobic about…

— Vivian Gornick